Im thinking about adding more hubitat hubs. I understand a nice mesh network will work fine but I see some intermittent slow downs. I was thinking about having a hub that was paired to all devices and then another to run rules and web based stuff
But had a few questions
Should the main coordinator hub via hubconnect have all the rules and web based apps on it? Should all the apps be installed on it?
Should I install any apps of the hub that the devices are paired too?
Im trying to figure out how I can do this to get the fastest response times from the hubs.
There isn't one particular way to do it. Some people prefer to keep the rules on one hub and the devices on another. Another way is to separate the Z-Wave radio from the Zigbee radio and put them on different hubs.
Myself, I put my rules on the same hub the associated devices are on. I have three hubs. The first is upstairs devices+rules, the Second is downstairs devices+rules, and the Third is a coordinator hub that runs things like Chromecast, Google Home, a weather device, contains the "All Lights" group and other big groups, handles mode changes, notifications, and administrative stuff.
Putting a rule on the same hub as a device should theoretically be faster since it doesn't have to travel through the LAN pipeline. However, HubConnect is extremely fast and I don't know if you'd be able to tell the difference either way. That being said, feel free to try both ways and share your experiences.
Anyone have any real world experience with this comment? I'm thinking about placing all of my rules on a hub dedicated to all rule machine processing separate from the device hubs. I'm hearing rule machine slows down zwave commands being sent through the hub that has the devices attached.
I use NR to run automations that use 2 Hubitats, a Caseta Pro bridge, and a Harmony hub.
Based on Hubitat logs, motion based lighting that relies on Hubitat-paired zwave/zigbee sensors and Caseta dimmers/switches is between 130-200 ms. Heavily skewed toward b 130.
Node-RED is a separate server you can run on a Raspberry PI or VM.. It acts like a master controller.
HubConnect not required. It connects to each hub via the maker api and @fblackburn's excellent HE Nodes. One of the nice things is you can move all your logic over to NR and reduce HE resource usage. My 3 hubs only have groups/scenes, lutron integrator, maker and Zone Motion apps. No rules or anything.
Another nice feature is you can integrate multiple different platforms in addition to HE if you need to.. like Smart Things, Home Assistant etc. very flexible.
I don't think so.. it may be in the works however (see the What's Next section in his post). @fblackburn can probably answer that one.. I have to say it is a very compelling system worth taking a look. It's not for everyone though..
